Tim Travers & The Time Traveler's Paradox

Tim Travers, a brilliant and somewhat reclusive physicist, spends years researching the elusive concept of time travel. Driven by a mix of curiosity and obsession, Travers invests his entire being in the pursuit of breaking through the spacetime continuum. His counterparts in the scientific community consider him a maverick, someone who'll stop at nothing to achieve his goals, no matter the cost. Travers finally achieves the impossible: he creates a functioning time machine. The device, known as the 'Chrono-displacement Engine,' is a massive structure that fills the entire laboratory where Travers works. It consists of layers upon layers of components, serving various functions to facilitate the breakdown of the time-space barrier. Travers sees his invention as the answer to humanity's fundamental questions about existence and the universe. One day, before he activates his creation, a series of events unfold, leading to the culmination of his life's work – and to his fatal mistake. Trying the machine for the first time, Travers journeys back in time to the moment when he was a young scientist, on the cusp of his first major epiphanies. But something within him gives in to an overwhelming madness, and he becomes the instrument of his own doom. In a fit of rage, he fatally wounds his younger counterpart during a haphazard argument. The reality is that a man cannot kill his younger self without creating a logical paradox – this would result in an event that contradicts its own cause. If Travers' younger self dies, the events leading up to this 'Paradox' are nullified. If he exists, then he didn't kill his younger self because he never existed in the first place. With a twinge of macabre morbidness, Travers realizes that this is the fate that awaits him: a double denial that refutes his own existence. However, despite logic and reason suggesting that Paradoxes should be impossible, Tim Travers defies probability when he does manage to find himself alive on a different, disparate plane of existence. It is as if the paradox was delayed, possibly by the inherent complexity of the time-space continuum, giving rise to a self-sustaining anomaly that ensures – against all odds – Travers' continued existence. As a result, paradox theory shakes to its core, leaving the scientific establishment stunned. Many begin to research and study the phenomenon, looking for an explanation that could corroborate the anomaly's occurrence. One such enthusiast is Dr. D'Andrea, a maverick physicist driven by her own fascination with time and space, and she rapidly sets upon ascertaining the underlying dynamics driving this phenomena's emergence. Dr. Thompson, a rival of Travers, in whose eyes Travers had managed to upstage him as possibly being the lead scientists in a promising subject area, expresses extreme interest in helping the existing laws of physics to also recover from the disarray of this breakthrough, and he takes up support in D'Andrea for her theory. Confronting an existential uncertainty about his place in world, Travers has to confront a series of extraordinary circumstances. Questions form about whether anything we consider true simply because it exists can be manipulated or destroyed without that destruction affecting the space -time continuum, itself. He grapples with questions about what is meaningful to our understanding of reality if the past and present are open game. The world rapidly discovers what truly stands for infinity. Willingness of humanity's present inhabitants stand witness to everything a universe and its inhabitants can do collectively to confront the countless possible scenarios it may spawn from – is within a grand paradox's grip, not anything more predictable.